


graphite tributes

by C_AND_B



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:41:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26326558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C_AND_B/pseuds/C_AND_B
Summary: draw something beautiful, they said. she picks lena before the sentence is finished, before she can wonder if her professor knows everything she creates is the same thing – that it’s all lena, from the abstract swirls of blue and green, to the collages of destroyed science magazines and half finished sketches in fully packed sketchbooks.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 70
Kudos: 1116





	graphite tributes

**Author's Note:**

> so here's my contribution to this year's supercorp zine - was super cool to be a part of and i hope you guys like/liked this (don't be shy, still send the mods your love)

Draw something beautiful, they said. She picks Lena before the sentence is finished, before she can wonder if her professor knows everything she creates is the same thing – that it’s all Lena, from the abstract swirls of blue and green, to the collages of destroyed science magazines and half finished sketches in fully packed sketchbooks.

Draw something beautiful, they said. Kara picks Lena before the sentence is finished, has been picking Lena long before – even if she never has the courage to be quite so honest about it, even if all her honesty comes pouring out as pictures instead of real words.

_Her hands._

She starts with an outline. Gentle graphite strokes that speak of protruding knuckles and dancing bones – the very first things Kara ever noticed about her.

It was a Tuesday like any other as Kara stood in the lab across from the art studio, waiting to take Alex to lunch and touching nothing like she was expressly told to (the kind of warning that came from past experiences of priceless equipment snapping beneath her graceless hands).

A Tuesday like any other until her eyes found Lena. Not that she knew her name yet. Just the way her hands scribbled as she stared down at her sample. Uwavering. Precise. Beautiful.

She stared until Lena startled and she startled into another piece of invaluable equipment in return. Lena called her clumsy in a way that made her heart trip over its strings but had no real sting and with cautious hands swept up the mess Kara promised to pay for (she never paid for it, never even got the blame, Kara knows the reason is sharp green eyes that winked with a ‘shh’ signal).

She started going to Alex for a lunch a lot more after that. And one day, as luck would have it, Kara conveniently forgot that Alex wasn’t in the lab on Fridays and talked Lena into coming to tackle the new food challenge at the student café with her.

Kara did most of the eating, and the rambling, but Lena laughed at her jokes and the mess she made of her face with buffalo sauce and it was the beginning of something. A friendship that Lena accepted easily with sensible answers to Kara’s four am questions, and gentle words of encouragement on her art pieces, and heart emojis that made Kara’s heart feel anything but gentle.

Something started and it felt like everything.

_Her arms._

There was no single moment in which Kara realised she would lay down her life for Lena’s arms. It was a series of things. The way they would squeeze briefly in a hug as a silent gesture that Lena was ready to let go, the permanent black markings on her wrist that spoke of teenage rebellion and secret meanings, the soft hairs that tickled Kara’s palm when she dared ignore all the museum warnings she’d ever read and touched the art.

Never for long. Never long enough.

_Her torso_.

Her chest and stomach. The sharpness of her clavicle. The tempting curve of her hips.

Each new line is a moment for Kara to lose herself in the memory of the exacerbated rise and fall of Lena’s chest when she got really into explaining her work – like she couldn’t inhale enough air to get her words out, couldn’t find the oxygen needed to share her mind (Kara would give every molecule in her lungs to listen to her speak a little longer).

There’s a tremble to the lead line that comes alongside the fragment of memory dedicated to the soft skin of Lena’s stomach. The skin Kara caught a glimpse of and never forgot.

Movie night began with Lena’s open door and her friend adorned with dishevelled hair, dark circles and a jumper that swallowed her arms but just barely reached the hem of her sweatpants. It began with Lena looking more adorable than she had any right to and Kara knowing she needed to distract herself from it in whatever way possible.

She doesn’t know why she thought tickling would be the right answer. It didn’t help at all when Lena screamed and squirmed out of her grasp, nor when she slipped her voice into something more comfortable to warn Kara away, nor when Kara ignored her threat and tackled her to the couch and kept going and going and going until her fingertips grazed skin.

Then she froze.

Then everything just felt… _hot_.

Like Kara had stuck her hand into a flame and forgotten to pull it back out. She wanted nothing more than to let it engulf her again. She had never been more willing to char her skin, to scar the feeling of Lena onto her palm so that all any mystic could see in her future was _Lena, Lena, Lena._

She pulled back instead.

Ripped herself away in an instant and tucked in on herself in the next. Hands beneath her thighs, eyes straight ahead at the wall, blush boldly blooming across her cheeks.

Lena followed suit on the other end – face blank, emotions cleared. Not that Kara could have picked up on anything anyway, too enamoured by the lingering feeling of patterned ridges of stretch marks against her fingertips. She wished she had the time to map out every one, wished she had the bravery to press her lips gently to the subtle scaring, wished she could feel Lena tremble and laugh beneath her mouth and tell her to stop being weird.

She still does.

Instead they sat silently at their designated ends until the tension dropped and they gravitated to the centre of the couch once again. Thighs touching. Fingers intertwined. Eyes still locked forward like if Kara didn’t turn she couldn’t ruin the moment, couldn’t spill all her secrets accidentally, couldn’t startle Lena into realising this wasn’t something that normal friends did.

_Her neck_.

The tantalising slope. The prominent cords. That one freckle that Kara zones out for a good hour to think about (as is customary to pay it the respect it deserves).

She laid her lips on it once - not on purpose. It was just that, at some point in their relationship, kisses became a thing. Chaste reminders of how far their relationship had come from that first meeting. Innocent displays of how comfortable they were with each other, how comfortable Kara had managed to make Lena with tactile touches that held no intent beyond an outpouring of the warmth she couldn’t hold in anymore.

But they weren’t anything more than chaste cheek kisses in greeting and passing, gentle forehead kisses at the end of a hard day, a knuckle kiss or two when Kara spilled coffee across her hands because Lena looked too pretty for the appendages to remember the basic rules of gripping they had taken for granted for so long.

They weren’t anything more…until they were.

It was an accident. One that stemmed from an attempted cheek kiss and a misjudgement of the angles because Lena had decided to wear insanely high heels. One that had Kara aiming for normalcy and landing somewhere between a butterfly moshpit and a heart attack. One that ended in Kara’s lips on Lena’s neck for one frozen second longer than decent.

Neither of them said anything about it but neither of them actually said anything at all as they avoided eye contact and ran in opposite directions of one another.

Kara thought about it for weeks after.

She still thinks about it.

_Her face_.

Kara had spent so long staring at Lena’s face that it felt like a haunting hallucination to finally touch.

It started with her jaw. Kara wasn’t there for the incident but she feels as though she was from the way Alex recounted the events with raucous laughter. The same laughter Kara heard bellowing when she raced down to the lab to check in on Lena instead of going to class.

It started with **_CAUTION_** in bold lettering on sharp canary yellow and Kara pushing Alex mid-laugh until she was the one slipping over in the lab. She felt bad about it until she caught sight of Lena.

A purple cloud that had already taken the sharp, angular bone of her jaw hostage. A clouding of judgement that stopped Kara from thinking clearly enough to halt the movement of her fingers, drifting beneath Lena’s chin to gently tilt her head for a better view.

Her soft questions about the pain were echoed by the subtle shift of her fingers across the colouration and met with wordless head shakes, reassuring smiles and bold eyes that watched Kara sharply. Kara had jumped at the excuse to gaze back in earnest – to interrogate every feature of Lena’s face one by one.

Bold cheekbones, perfectly sculpted eyebrows and bright eyes that sparked in a moment of contact with her own. A moment too long. A moment that had Kara knowing the exact shade to colour her eyes when the moment came. Similar but not quite the same. Different in the way they almost dared the light to shine at a different angle and change them. A kaleidoscope of beauty.

_Her lips_.

Lips that Kara has no idea how to draw. She doesn’t know why. She’d definitely spent enough time looking, had stolen too many glances and imagined what it might be like to touch – just for a second, just a graze of her thumb, or her mouth, her tongue.

But no memory seems enough and so she stares at a Lena with no mouth and wonders how she’s supposed to fix a block she doesn’t understand.

Stares so hard that she forgets time is a thing. That her time was limited between the moment she woke up and the moment she told Lena to show up for brunch. That her time was once spent telling Lena about her hidden key and how she should use it whenever she wanted because sometimes Kara got so lost in a project that she couldn’t hear outside sounds.

She definitely hears Lena’s gasp though.

“It’s not done,” she quickly supplies as she spins, as though that’s the problem here. As though she hadn’t brushed her heart onto a canvas so plainly. As though she hadn’t ground her own bones into dust to perfect the shadows and contours that her feelings hid within.

“That’s me.”

“It’s you.”

Lena steps closer. She never looks at Kara, never moves away from her own likeness, never smoothes the furrow in her brow that says she’s in the middle of working out a difficult equation. Kara wishes she could draw every one of her emotions at once.

“What was the assignment?”

“Something beautiful,” Kara whispers.

“Am I more beautiful when I’m not talking?” The jokes fall flat against tense air. Kara almost follows suit when Lena’s eyes shift to pin her in place.

“Drawing from memory is hard sometimes. It’s about finding moments to focus on and I couldn’t think of one that fit-- one that was powerful enou-“ Kara loses her sentence the second Lena’s shaky hand touches her cheek. Loses her breath in the next when Lena kisses her.

She wonders briefly how she could paint the taste of Lena’s mouth as Lena pulls back gently, eyes locked firmly shut, how she could portray the warmth of the coffee and the sharpness of the mint and the sticky sweet strawberry of the lipgloss Lena bought at the mall the week before.

“Good enough memory?”

“It’s a start,” Kara says gently, brushing the crease between Lena’s eyes until they flutter open. “I think I might like to paint you for the rest of my life though.”

Lena grins, “I’ll have to keep refreshing it then.”

Draw something beautiful, they said. Kara picks Lena before the sentence is finished, has been picking Lena long before, will keep picking her a long time after – but who could blame her when her _girlfriend_ so happily gave her the inspiration.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: c--and--b


End file.
